Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, Sir Neville Marriner - Marriner & The Academy: 20th Century Classics (10CD BoxSet) (2011)

For many listeners, Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields led the charge for authentic performance style (albeit, while still using modern instruments) in the late 1960s and 1970s with their polished recordings of Classical masterpieces by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Joseph Haydn, and Ludwig van Beethoven. But there is a solid representation of Romantic and modern repertoire in their catalog, which is generously offered in Marriner & The Academy: 20th Century Classics. Most of the selections are certainly works of the modern era, and composers such as Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Dmitry Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Sergey Prokofiev, Arnold Schoenberg, and Anton Webern, among others, belong at the center of this survey. Yet the inclusion of 19th century music by Richard Wagner, Heinrich Baermann, George Bizet, and Edvard Grieg, as well as post-Romantic works by Carl Nielsen, George Butterworth, and Richard Strauss, make the theme of the ten-disc set a little confusing. Yet these discs are worthy reissues of albums first released by Argo (presented here in cardboard sleeves that feature the original cover art) and content was put over period consistency for the coherence of the program (e.g., Bizet's Symphony in C was coupled with Prokofiev's "Classical" Symphony, or Wagner's Siegfried Idyll paired with Strauss' Metamorphosen). Putting that consideration aside, the works chosen are all well-suited to the chamber orchestra proportions of the Academy, and the playing is exceptional, in many cases the musicians' best. The sound quality of these recordings varies a little from disc to disc, as should be expected in a set of this broad scope, but the ADD reproduction is clean and clear in every track.